white nationalist

White nationalism is winning for the GOP at the state and local level across a limited swath of the country while poisoning the conservative brand everywhere else. This is not inevitable, but the drift toward white nationalist politics, so grossly apparent in the shocking mainstream support for “welfare rancher” Cliven Bundy, has gained a disturbing momentum that will be difficult to halt.

Not so long ago things were very different. When Reagan won his epic national mandate in 1984, there were only a few dozen counties that registered the levels of overwhelming Republican support seen by Romney in 2012. By contrast, Reagan’s win was as broad as it was deep. Ronald Reagan won 48% of the vote in Chicago’s Cook County. He earned 54% in LA County and more than 40% in Detroit’s Wayne County.

This new vision of Republican politics, so starkly at odds with the party’s 150 years of Hamiltonian capitalism, has given refugee Dixiecrats a new home and a powerful political dominance. Republicans are poised to extend their power almost everywhere in the South and the rural West. Neo-Confederate politics will strangle Republicans in their remaining classic strongholds in Northern and Western suburbs, but it will intensify Republican control in states already red.

In short, the Republican Party can survive and thrive under a slightly modified Confederate banner, just not at the national level and not for very long.